I think the real reason we're getting Jaina first is because she is the first hero you unlock when playing Hearthstone. They can move new players from the tutorial over to the adventure easily and it's an extra step of learning for the game.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Book of Heroes is a new tutorial mode and once it's completed with all heroes available, that will be the new way to unlock them all. The Demon Hunter campaign was a great way to introduce heroes and its possible Basic card unlocks could be moved to individual fights in the adventure.
That is a great point! Demon Hunter is such an awkward class to talk about with stuff like this because they simply don't have the larger card pool everyone else does and with them being so aggressive, all the good cards are always so cheap.
MTG Arena is more aggressive than Hearthstone when it comes to monetization. It is a lot more expensive if you want to play a large variety of decks in constructed, and they have more frequent content releases which can make it easy to get behind.
With that said though, I know multiple people who play the game free to play and have fun doing so. I definitely recommend giving it a shot
Honestly, I've been very disappointed with MTG sites over the years. A lot of them are built... interestingly... and that was one of the reasons why I decided that Out of Cards wasn't just going to be a Hearthstone site, but rather something we could build upon over time and cover other games we love.
It has taken us longer than I would have liked to get to the point of us covering MTG more, but I'm happy we're making progress towards that goal :D
The second update in the deck widget series has arrived!
New Features
Deck Widget Preferences
You can now customize preferences for the homepage deck widget.
Preferences are accessed on portal pages and the home page via the cog/gear icon found at the top right of the decks widget.
Selecting a homepage game will force that game's decks to always load on the homepage, no matter where you've been on the site.
You can customize each game's default deck widget preferences independently.
Changes
Deck Widget
Selected game gets a colored icon.
Hearthstone
Portal page now has the new and improved deck widget.
Runeterra
Portal page now has the new and improved deck widget.
Improvements to performance on deck pages.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue with deck widgets not loading for new users to the site. (Issue with initial deploy)
Notes
We should have had the ability to sort forum threads in recent threads by their game. There's an issue preventing us from pushing this live and is going to require some serious digging. This was supposed to be a simple change.
We've also updated a few cards that were still using outdated images from patch 1.8. We performed a full data reimport yesterday, but it wasn't worth it because Riot didn't have updated set1 and set2 data on their API until now (or much later yesterday).
Whoa! It's been something crazy like 8 months since we removed decks from the homepage of Out of Cards. Today, that changes.
New Features
Homepage Decks Widget
Quite possibly the most complicated system we have on the site so far.
Here's how it works:
The current "game" that you have active is what decks will display by default.
Decks will show, by default, "Week" timeframe and "Hot" sorting with only decks that include a written guide.
Here's the planned update for Friday:
Adding the ability to customize your defaults.
Did you look at some Runeterra news but you only want to see Hearthstone decks? No problem.
Do you want to default to Hearthstone Wild Paladin decks? You go!
All the sorting options available now will be able to be saved as your own preferences.
Dev Notes
I wanted a more visual approach with icons for Classes and Regions for their respective games, but the interesting issues with cross-platform and cross-device features were prohibitive. Also, Demon Hunter can rot in hell for having such a long name that is tough to design around. I believe it looks cleaner without them all out in the open, at the sacrifice of extra clicks if you want to quickly check multiple classes/regions out. This might be updated in the future to make class selections easier.
And on the note of class selections, I already know a request is going to be written somewhere that asks we allow you to customize the filters with something such as "Paladin and Druid decks". This might be a feature enhancement down the line. I'm not making any promises right now though.
Changes
Hearthstone
Collection Manager now has a "bulk remove" button.
Hit save after using bulk remove to update your collection on the site.
This is an easy way to reset your collection back to square one, or reverse an accidental "bulk adds".
Runeterra
Collection Manager now has a "bulk remove" button.
Hit save after using bulk remove to update your collection on the site.
This is an easy way to reset your collection back to square one, or reverse an accidental "bulk adds".
Bug Fixes
Runeterra
Fixed LoR deck codes not generating codes when Targon cards were present.
Corrected dropdowns available in the Collection Manager.
Fixed an issue where the Collection Manager wouldn't let you remove single copies of a card.
Upcoming
Next Update: Filtering by game for recent forum threads.
Early September: MTG Arena Database and Decks support
If it wasn't for Hearthstone and Runeterra being so active this month, it would have arrived.
I'm gonna sneak something in later for this. I was trying to get it out before the morning deploy but got caught fixing a couple of critical bugs instead.
That's a real cool feature, thanks a lot! Also for letting us know your thought process. The customer service on this page is insane. As a certified quality manager, that warms my heart.
I did say when we launched I always wanted my transparency with stuff =D
My only regret is that we don't talk more about upcoming stuff. Sometimes stuff just isn't worth talking about if its too far out because it would let competitors know what we're thinking. I'd rather anyone that wanted to lift features from here instead have to be reactionary. Though, no one has made an attempt at that yet over the past year so that's funny :P
Great work, thanks for your dedication! I'll use the opportunity to request a quality of life feature. I really like the concept of the portals. Would it be possible to expand this feature to the point where users could permanently choose one of them in account management?
It's a very interesting point of discussion. The original idea is we were going to let everyone decide what they would see on the homepage as far as the news went. Over time though, I no longer thought that was the best solution and instead provided the portals that we now have. The way I've seen it, having the portals be dedicated places gives people a more tailored experience for each title and they have more benefits by visiting them individually if you so choose. It is easy for people to update their browser bookmark for the site so they can visit the portal over the homepage.
Allowing for a swap-out also sucks because if someone happens to follow two games instead of one, they wouldn't have a special homepage option available to them.
Now, some of that is a bit dated though and I'll explain why!
We've got a feature dropping either late tonight or tomorrow which brings back decks to the homepage. Our first iteration of this was exactly what we see on the Hearthstone portal, but it was silly to have Hearthstone decks be the only thing featured on the homepage. The new widget has some customization to it which will allow you to select a default game and even a default sort so that you will always see what you want when loading up the homepage. A good example of this would be for Wild Hearthstone players. If you want to only see Wild Hearthstone decks on the homepage when you visit, this will be exactly what you're going to see. You'll also always have the ability to view the other stuff by using the available sorts, but your default preference will be saved.
This might get extended to news posts.
The decks part of it wasn't very complicated to figure out and make performant. With news being simpler than decks, the ability to customize which games get displayed on the homepage news feed for any one person isn't a difficult extension. I do dislike that you lose some potential overlap. Maybe one day Riot makes a really cool Runeterra announcement that could entice a player that is only interested in Hearthstone, but has been having a negative time recently, but it won't be able to because they decided they only wanted to see Hearthstone news. One workaround I had considered for this problem is we'll inject major announcements (flagging articles them as such) into the homepage feed no matter what, but this would only be confusing to people.
I see pros and cons on both sides of it. Ultimately though, I do think leaving the choice in the hands of everyone is a good idea. You're all smart enough to decide what you want to see and on the very tiny chance you visit the homepage and don't get to see that Wizards is giving everyone a bunch of free stuff because you only want to see Hearthstone content, that was that person's choice to make.
No ETA on news on the homepage changes, but decks are arriving very soon.
OOPS!
Don't pin that one on Echo, that was on me! Sorry about that and thank you, added the correct text to the article =)
We have had two other purchasable Hunter heroes - Alleria Windrunner and Sylvanas Windrunner.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/guides/39-how-to-obtain-hearthstones-alternate-hunter-heroes/
For Rogue, yeah, we've only had Maiev Shadowsong and that was a while ago. At least we can't be too far off a new Rogue hero!
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/guides/43-how-to-obtain-hearthstones-alternate-rogue-heroes/
I think the real reason we're getting Jaina first is because she is the first hero you unlock when playing Hearthstone. They can move new players from the tutorial over to the adventure easily and it's an extra step of learning for the game.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Book of Heroes is a new tutorial mode and once it's completed with all heroes available, that will be the new way to unlock them all. The Demon Hunter campaign was a great way to introduce heroes and its possible Basic card unlocks could be moved to individual fights in the adventure.
That is a great point! Demon Hunter is such an awkward class to talk about with stuff like this because they simply don't have the larger card pool everyone else does and with them being so aggressive, all the good cards are always so cheap.
I'm guessing $15 USD, though $10 would be ideal considering we're getting 10 new heroes in total.
$10 for the hero, $5 for the packs isn't a bad breakdown for $15 though.
Nope!
Most of the time, we do post a Tavern Brawl article. Things have just been hectic these past few days and one didn't make it up.
MTG Arena is more aggressive than Hearthstone when it comes to monetization. It is a lot more expensive if you want to play a large variety of decks in constructed, and they have more frequent content releases which can make it easy to get behind.
With that said though, I know multiple people who play the game free to play and have fun doing so. I definitely recommend giving it a shot
I cannot wait to get my hands on it to try it out. I also didn't think that MTG would ever translate well to mobile, but I'd love to be wrong.
Thanks! <3
Honestly, I've been very disappointed with MTG sites over the years. A lot of them are built... interestingly... and that was one of the reasons why I decided that Out of Cards wasn't just going to be a Hearthstone site, but rather something we could build upon over time and cover other games we love.
It has taken us longer than I would have liked to get to the point of us covering MTG more, but I'm happy we're making progress towards that goal :D
The second update in the deck widget series has arrived!
New Features
Deck Widget Preferences
Changes
Deck Widget
Hearthstone
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
Notes
Yup! We're actually going to be pushing that out this afternoon along with customization options for the decks widget =D
Ah, damn. I was looking on his blog to see if there was anything there for this and clearly missed this. Thanks!
We've also updated a few cards that were still using outdated images from patch 1.8. We performed a full data reimport yesterday, but it wasn't worth it because Riot didn't have updated set1 and set2 data on their API until now (or much later yesterday).
Shoulda checked before spending that time lol.
Whoa! It's been something crazy like 8 months since we removed decks from the homepage of Out of Cards. Today, that changes.
New Features
Homepage Decks Widget
Changes
Hearthstone
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
Runeterra
Upcoming
Heya, this should be resolved as of yesterday. Let me know if you see any additional issues!
Got our first deploy of the day out. I am expecting another one this afternoon / evening.
Changes
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
Runeterra
General
I'm gonna sneak something in later for this. I was trying to get it out before the morning deploy but got caught fixing a couple of critical bugs instead.
I did say when we launched I always wanted my transparency with stuff =D
My only regret is that we don't talk more about upcoming stuff. Sometimes stuff just isn't worth talking about if its too far out because it would let competitors know what we're thinking. I'd rather anyone that wanted to lift features from here instead have to be reactionary. Though, no one has made an attempt at that yet over the past year so that's funny :P
I didn't say stuff enough, so, stuff.
It's a very interesting point of discussion. The original idea is we were going to let everyone decide what they would see on the homepage as far as the news went. Over time though, I no longer thought that was the best solution and instead provided the portals that we now have. The way I've seen it, having the portals be dedicated places gives people a more tailored experience for each title and they have more benefits by visiting them individually if you so choose. It is easy for people to update their browser bookmark for the site so they can visit the portal over the homepage.
Allowing for a swap-out also sucks because if someone happens to follow two games instead of one, they wouldn't have a special homepage option available to them.
Now, some of that is a bit dated though and I'll explain why!
We've got a feature dropping either late tonight or tomorrow which brings back decks to the homepage. Our first iteration of this was exactly what we see on the Hearthstone portal, but it was silly to have Hearthstone decks be the only thing featured on the homepage. The new widget has some customization to it which will allow you to select a default game and even a default sort so that you will always see what you want when loading up the homepage. A good example of this would be for Wild Hearthstone players. If you want to only see Wild Hearthstone decks on the homepage when you visit, this will be exactly what you're going to see. You'll also always have the ability to view the other stuff by using the available sorts, but your default preference will be saved.
This might get extended to news posts.
The decks part of it wasn't very complicated to figure out and make performant. With news being simpler than decks, the ability to customize which games get displayed on the homepage news feed for any one person isn't a difficult extension. I do dislike that you lose some potential overlap. Maybe one day Riot makes a really cool Runeterra announcement that could entice a player that is only interested in Hearthstone, but has been having a negative time recently, but it won't be able to because they decided they only wanted to see Hearthstone news. One workaround I had considered for this problem is we'll inject major announcements (flagging articles them as such) into the homepage feed no matter what, but this would only be confusing to people.
I see pros and cons on both sides of it. Ultimately though, I do think leaving the choice in the hands of everyone is a good idea. You're all smart enough to decide what you want to see and on the very tiny chance you visit the homepage and don't get to see that Wizards is giving everyone a bunch of free stuff because you only want to see Hearthstone content, that was that person's choice to make.
No ETA on news on the homepage changes, but decks are arriving very soon.